The impact of the administration of unemployment benefits on time spent unemployed is a neglected issue in discussion of incentive effects in Central and Eastern Europe. We use Labour Force Survey data, administrative registers and inspection of benefit office practices to show that there is...

We provide new evidence about the degree of social segregation in England’s secondary schools, employing a cross-national perspective. Analysis is based on data for 27 rich industrialised countries from the 2000 and 2003 rounds of the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA), using...

Over the last four decades, academic and wider public interest in inequality and poverty has grown substantially. In this paper we address the question: what have been the major new directions in the analysis of inequality and poverty over the last thirty to forty years? We draw attention to...

Within-country differences in educational outcomes are compared for a large group of industrialised countries. We investigate where inequality is greatest, the association between inequality in learning and average levels of learning, the interpretation of measured levels of inequality, and...

Individuals' donations to overseas charities are an important source of funding for development assistance from rich industrialised countries. But little is known about the nature of these charitable donations. The literature on giving focuses on total donations to all causes and does not...

We analyse response patterns to an important survey of school children, exploiting rich auxiliary information on respondents' and non-respondents' cognitive ability that is correlated both with response and the learning achievement that the survey aims to measure. The survey is the Programme for...

"League table" information on school effectiveness in England generally relies on either a comparison of the average outcomes of pupils by school, e.g. mean exam scores, or on estimates of the average value added by each school. These approaches assume that the information parents and...

Charitable bequests are a major source of income for charities but surprisingly little is known about them. The aim of this paper is to propose a multi-stage framework for analysing the bequest decision and to examine the evidence for Great Britain provided by new data on estates. The novelty of...

Using logistic and multilevel logistic modelling we examine non-response at the school and pupil level to the important educational achievement survey Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for England. The analysis exploits unusually rich auxiliary information on all schools and...